Radical Politics: On the Causes of

Contemporary Emancipation Peter D.

Thomas
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/radical-politics-on-the-causes-of-contemporary-eman
cipation-peter-d-thomas/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Labour Under Corbyn: Constraints on Radical Politics in

the UK Prapimphan Chiengkul

https://ebookmass.com/product/labour-under-corbyn-constraints-on-
radical-politics-in-the-uk-prapimphan-chiengkul/

Labour Under Corbyn: Constraints on Radical Politics in

the UK 1st ed. Edition Prapimphan Chiengkul

https://ebookmass.com/product/labour-under-corbyn-constraints-on-
radical-politics-in-the-uk-1st-ed-edition-prapimphan-chiengkul/

Line of Glory Thomas D. Clagett

https://ebookmass.com/product/line-of-glory-thomas-d-clagett/

Sovereignty and Event: The Political in John D.

Caputo’s Radical Theology Calvin D. Ullrich

https://ebookmass.com/product/sovereignty-and-event-the-
political-in-john-d-caputos-radical-theology-calvin-d-ullrich/
Line of Glory: A Story of the Alamo Thomas D. Clagett

https://ebookmass.com/product/line-of-glory-a-story-of-the-alamo-
thomas-d-clagett/

Shocks, States, and Sustainability: The Origins of

Radical Environmental Reforms Thomas K. Rudel

https://ebookmass.com/product/shocks-states-and-sustainability-
the-origins-of-radical-environmental-reforms-thomas-k-rudel/

Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating

Hate Thomas Brudholm

https://ebookmass.com/product/hate-politics-law-critical-
perspectives-on-combating-hate-thomas-brudholm/

All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious

Alternatives to Liberalism Kevin Vallier

https://ebookmass.com/product/all-the-kingdoms-of-the-world-on-
radical-religious-alternatives-to-liberalism-kevin-vallier/

The Creators of Inside Money 1st ed. Edition D. Gareth

Thomas

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-creators-of-inside-money-1st-
ed-edition-d-gareth-thomas/
Radical Politics
 HERETICAL THOUGHT
Series editor: Ruth O’Brien,
The Graduate Center,
City University of New York
Call Your “Mutha’ ”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in
the Anthropocene
Jane Caputi
Assembly
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Part-Time for All: A Care Manifesto
Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson
Wild Democracy: Anarchy, Courage, and Ruling the Law
Anne Norton
The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
Catherine Rottenberg
Interior Frontiers: Essays on the Entrails of Inequality
Ann Laura Stoler
Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation
Peter D. Thomas
Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity
Massimiliano Tomba
 Radical Politics
On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation
PETER D. THOMAS
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thomas, Peter D., author.
Title: Radical politics : on the causes of contemporary emancipation / Peter D. Thomas.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Series: Heretical thought |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023007082 (print) | LCCN 2023007083 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197528075 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197528099 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Political participation. | Social movements. |
Radicalism. | State, The. | Political science—Philosophy. |
Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937.
Classification: LCC JF799 .T55 2023 (print) | LCC JF799 (ebook) |
DDC 303.48/4—dc23/eng/20230321
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007082
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007083
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197528075.001.0001
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t
The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–220

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s

house”
Audre Lorde
 Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Radical Politics against the New World Order

1. Final Cause: Politics Beyond the State
2. Material Cause: The Constitution of the Political
3. Efficient Cause: Hegemony as a Method of Political Work
4. Formal Cause: The Question of Organization
Conclusion: Contemporary Self-Emancipation

Notes
Index
 Acknowledgments

The themes explored in this book were developed over many years
in a variety of conference papers, seminar presentations,
publications and conversations. I am grateful for the stimulating
criticisms and suggestions that I received on all of those occasions,
by comrades, interlocutors and critics too numerous to mention. A
year spent in the School of Social Science at the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, provided the space and distance needed
to think seriously about the overall conceptual architecture of my
argument. I am grateful to Didier Fassin for the opportunity to
participate in that distinctive scholarly environment. I owe a special
debt to Joan Scott for her unwavering moral and intellectual support,
and to the members of the reading group that she convened
throughout a memorable year: Johanna Bockman, Peter Covielo,
John Modern, Julie Orlemanski, and Angela Zimmerman. As always,
my most unpayable debts, and deepest thanks, are to Sara R. Farris,
Mira, and Nadia.
This book is dedicated to the teacher and friend whose concrete
example first inspired me to try to understand the deep structures of
feeling and response that are embodied in self-emancipatory politics:
Daniel Francis Patrick O’Neill, il miglior fabbro e maestro di color che
sanno.
 Introduction
Radical Politics against the New World Order

Besides, it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of

transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto
inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in
the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always
engaged in moving forward.1

Hegel’s reflections in the midst of the great events that inaugurated

global political modernity—a revolution against slavery, the
dissolution of the feudal order, the vindication of the rights of
women, among so many others—might seem to speak also to the
immense political transformations of our own times. The early years
of the twenty-first century have witnessed wave after wave of
protests and rebellions against the “New World Order” that was
proclaimed with the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the consolidation of
what has become known as “neoliberalism” on a global scale. From
the clarion call of the Zapatista’s uprising in the early 1990s; the
alternative globalization movement straddling the turn of the new
century; anti-war protests throughout its first decade; the “pink tide”
of progressive governments in Latin America; revolutionary upsurges
in the “Arab Spring”; anti-austerity campaigns; and the
“Intersectional Sociopolitical Movements” that have defined popular
responses to the latest round of capitalist crisis internationally, the
depoliticization and neutralization frequently foretold or feared by
the auguries of both right and left over the last 30 years have failed
to appear.2
Recent decades have instead witnessed a proliferation of radical
emancipatory social and political movements. They have been
“radical” not in the sense of merely extreme (such as when, e.g., the
term is used to characterize supposedly “radical” right-wing politics)
but in its more profound sense as a fundamental questioning of the
nature and causes of the manifold experiences of injustice within the
current order. “To be radical,” as Marx wrote, “is to grasp the root of
the matter”; in a world such as ours that continues to be structured
by generalized relations of exploitation, subjugation, and
subalternization, to be radical means in the first instance to work for
emancipation from all such conditions wherever they are
encountered.3 It is precisely this task that the most dynamic of
contemporary movements have set themselves.
Sometimes these radical emancipatory movements have been
punctual and sometimes delayed, sometimes ephemeral in
appearance and sometimes subterranean in effect; but their
stubbornly persistent emergence and re-emergence signifies the
development of new forms of conflict and struggle of the popular or
subaltern social groups and classes.4 The new century seems to be
characterized by a progressive accumulation of accelerated political
cycles on a variety of terrains and in different geopolitical regions, as
if it were only through the exhaustion of spirit in one of its
incarnations that it might gather the strength to spring forth afresh
elsewhere, clothed in different garbs yet cut from the same cloth.
These movements of resistance and revolt may not have issued in
many unambiguous victories. Their failures may not even have been
of an important type. And the significance of whatever modest
successes these movements may have enjoyed in their own
moments has been continually found wanting when measured
against standards derived from previous and wholly different political
conjunctures.
At the beginning of each upsurge of struggles, it has not been
difficult to hear voices hopefully declaring the end of a long season
of defeats and the opening of a new chapter in the universal history
of the forward march of popular movements. Retrospect, even at a
short remove, seems quickly to deflate such enthusiasms, seeing in
what was yesterday’s novelty merely an eventual exception that
does not disprove the continuing rule of the party of order. Indeed,
in some cases, it even appears to have been strengthened,
particularly when xenophobic, racist, and nationalist mobilizations or
revivals of the far right have been able to fill the vacuum left by the
defeat or demobilization of emancipatory projects.
The spectacular irruption and subsequent fierce repression of
revolutionary initiatives in the Arab Spring constitutes the most tragic
and significant example of this negative dialectic. The brief flowering
of the Occupy movement in the heart of the imperialist powers in
the early years of the second decade of the century and its equally
rapid “dispersion”—in both figurative and literal senses—followed
something of the same pattern, albeit on a lesser scale. In a longer-
term perspective, the sequential election of progressive governments
in Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia raised hopes for the inauguration of
a “socialism for the twenty-first century.” In each case, initial
enthusiasms more or less gradually subsided, when they were not
abandoned, as those movements and their domestic and
international supporters confronted the sober realities and
contradictions of governing what remained societies fundamentally
structured by capitalist social relations, of socialization just as much
of production.5
In a similar fashion, the hopes of the European Left have
migrated over the last decades, with specific, nationally based
political formations appearing to represent—at least for a season—a
paradigm for a more general continental recomposition of
progressive forces. These exemplary instances have included
Rifondazione comunista in Italy, at the height of “the movement of
movements” in the early years of the century; Die Linke in Germany
in the wake of the movements against the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq at the midpoint of the first decade; the foundation of the
Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste in France in 2009 embodying hopes for
leftist recomposition that were soon dashed; SYRIZA’s revolt against
the creditors in Greece before its capitulation to the Troika’s dictates
in 2015; Podemos’s ongoing traversal of the contradictions of the
austerity-riven and disintegrating Spanish nation state; or the
enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party in the
UK, echoing and echoed by the mobilizations around Bernie Sander’s
bids for the Presidency in the United States. Most recently, this
accumulative cycle has been shadowed by a revival of the extreme
right across the continent and around the globe not entirely
incomparable to the dynamics of the 1930s.
We seem to live in something of an interregnum, as elements of
the old tenaciously hold back the emergence of the new, as hopes
are raised and just as soon dashed, hanged on the expectation of
plenty. As Antonio Gramsci noted in a very different period, with a
formulation that seemed to become ubiquitous since the global
financial crisis in 2007–2008, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact
that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this
interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”6 Yet
whatever strange beasts slouch toward Bethlehem today, and
however much reactionary currents seem to have grown in strength
in recent years in particular national contexts, at least one thing
seems to be clear when considering the global situation over the
longer, extended generational period that runs from the 1990s until
today: something fundamental has shifted in the exhausted
structures of feeling and response that were dominated by the
experience of defeats for emancipatory politics in the final phases of
the twentieth century.
The type of “left melancholia” that corralled critical political
energies for more than a generation no longer exerts the same
mesmerizing fascination that dominated so many leftist responses
from the 1980s onward.7 For those who have been active in the
movements and mobilizations of the nascent oppositional political
cultures of the last decades, such an orientation can only seem
strangely dated, if not even narcissistic. From these younger
standpoints, the horizons of the present no longer appear as pale
reflections of the past or menacing shadows of its traumatic
repetition, but are populated by figures of the new, and of the
unexpected.
This novelty derives in the first instance from changed conditions
of contemporary politics, characterized by a unique conjugation of
crises on multiple fronts: expansive capitalist globalization in a
unipolar world accompanied by increasing imperialist interventionism
around the globe, accelerating environmental catastrophes on an
apocalyptic scale coinciding with the pulverization of autonomous
institutions of popular industrial and political organization, the
redefinition of the sites of injustice and its contestation occurring
alongside technological reconfigurations of social space and time.
But the distinctiveness of this period also owes something to the way
in which contemporary movements have confronted its challenges as
discrete instances of protest, nevertheless in some way linked
together in their revolt against everything that is “the contemporary”
itself. Albeit unevenly, failing and recommencing in turn, frustratingly
patient in their broken rhythms, our times are marked by a revival of
popular struggles and new political practices on a scale not
witnessed since the “long 1960s.” Piece by piece, the new world
order seems to be dissolving before our eyes. A new product of
spirit, Hegel might have said, is being prepared.8

Contemporary Emancipatory Politics

It is not surprising that the punctual tempo of recent political
movements and their cycles has given rise to more provisional and
strategic forms of thought than the type of melancholic brooding
over epochal transformations that so entranced an earlier
generation. How is this particular movement to be built, in the here
and now? What are the social groups and actors most likely to
become involved in this initiative? How can they be encouraged to
move from passive support to active participation in the movement’s
development? These are questions that, in the simplicity of their
formulation and their orientation to the resolution of particular
problems, are both more particular than any periodizing narrative
but also more general than any temporal distinction. It is almost as if
these movements, in their commonalities and in their differences,
have been searching for responses to the questions posed by the
conjunctures themselves, questions simultaneously generic in their
import yet specific in each of their modes of formulation.
 It has been the repetition of these questions, different in their
sameness, which has been the most striking continuity across the
specificities of each discrete political cycle. It is almost as if,
unsatisfied, these questions demand to be revisited, reformulated
and reposed in each new moment. The emergence of every wave of
protest and resistance over the last 25 years has posed the problem
of attempting to “translate” experiences and insights from
immediately preceding cycles, not simply or even primarily in terms
of their responses but perhaps even more in terms of their modes of
posing these questions. It is a dialectic of simplification and
clarification that descends down—or ascends up—toward the “basic
problems” of political action, grasped in the specific formulations of
the contemporary conjuncture.
At least four such questions have been repeatedly posed in
distinct but related forms by the movements of the last 25 years.
These four questions focus on the goal, nature, method, and
organizational forms of political action. I propose to consider the
articulation of these questions as a potential “aitiology of
contemporary emancipation.”
Aitiology is today perhaps most commonly associated with a
medical vocabulary, a sounding of the depths that correspond to the
surface symptoms identified by its twin science of pathology. Other
readers may recall its usage in Freud’s early attempt to delineate a
foundational method for what would only later become
psychoanalysis.9 In this book, it is instead intended as one of its
original Greek and above all Aristotelian meanings: that is, an
account of the final, material, efficient, and formal “causes” [aitíai]
of radical political engagement.10
It is true that a notion of causation derived from a thinker who
infamously justified slavery as both natural and necessary may not
seem, at first sight, to be the most promising way to focus on the
challenges of contemporary emancipation. The great strength of the
Aristotelian tradition, however, is that it enables us to avoid the
reductions of those modern notions of cause (frequently inspired by
David Hume’s approach) that consider it in a restrictive sense as an
“origin” of a (potential) effect, with the various intentionalist or even
subjectivist deviations that follow from this premise. The more
expansive notion of an aitiology—a study of a thing’s “causes,” or the
modes of explaining its constitution—offers us a more differentiated
sense of all those features that can help us to explain why and how
something has come to be that which it is: or even more
importantly, why and how it might have the potential to become
something else.
The four questions of such an aitiology of contemporary
emancipation can be formulated in a condensed fashion in the
following ways:

• First, in terms of emancipatory politics’ “final” cause, or the end that it seeks
to achieve, what is the terrain on which emancipatory political activity today
should concentrate its efforts? Should the seizure of state power still
constitute the immediate or even ultimate goal of political action, or has the
centrality of “traditional” state power been superseded or displaced by the
emergence of other rationalities or regions of (political, social, ethical . . .)
power and its contestation?
• Second, regarding the “material” cause of emancipatory politics, or the stuff
of which it is made, what constitutes the distinctive nature of emancipatory
politics? Can it be conceived as the sublation, completion, or inheritor of
political modernity, or is it properly understood as oppositional and
antagonistic to all forms of political order hitherto?
• Third, in terms of emancipatory politics’ “efficient” cause, or the way in
which it is done, what methods of “political work” might help emancipatory
political movements to be built? Are these methods to be derived from
known models of political action, or do the goals of these movements
necessitate a different way of conceiving how politics itself might be done?
• And fourth and finally, as the “formal” cause of emancipatory politics, or
that which gives it its distinctive shape, what are the forms of organization
most likely to deepen and extend the dynamics that led to the emergence of
these movements of resistance and rebellion in the first place? Can a form
of the political party still be enabling, or would contemporary political
activity be better comprehended, theoretically and practically, in terms of
other forms of organization, association, and relationality?
 Translating Gramsci
This book explores the ways in which the implicit and explicit
responses of the political movements of the twenty-first century to
these four questions might be brought into productive dialogue with
the thought of Antonio Gramsci and the various conflicting
interpretative traditions that have grown up around it. It is
admittedly not immediately obvious why a reference to a figure from
the past, however interesting on their own terms, may be the most
useful way to pose these questions. If we wish to clarify the
conditions and potentials of contemporary emancipatory
movements, would it not make more sense to begin instead directly
from the debates that are actually happening today? Doesn’t such a
“return” to a known thinker risk becoming yet another flight from the
contradictions of the present rather than an attempt to resolve them
in the active construction of a different future?
Yet a historically significant figure such as Gramsci has a claim on
our attention today for a variety of reasons, each of them compelling
in its own way and none of them exhaustive on its own of his
multifaceted contemporaneity. Gramsci appeals to readers today, for
instance, due to his undoubted historical importance as one of the
most sophisticated theoretical expressions to have emerged from the
plurality of experiences, struggles, and discourses often too rapidly
condensed into the myth of a unitary or purportedly “classical”
Marxism and its supposedly Western aftermath. Similarly, while not
as clearly “canonical” as his near contemporaries Max Weber or Carl
Schmitt (at least for some influential currents of academic
discussion), Gramsci is undoubtedly today ranked among the major
political thinkers of the twentieth century. The fact that the most
recent philological and historical studies have substantially increased
our knowledge of his thought, revealing previously unnoted sources,
structures, and implications, suggests that revisiting the Prison
Notebooks today could prove to be generative of new insights and
perspectives not only for the history of political thought but also for
contemporary emancipatory politics.11
 Gramsci’s continuing significance is due not only to his formative
influence on the political culture of the New Left, particularly in the
1960s and 1970s, and many of its later derivations and afterlives,
including cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and subaltern studies.
Equally, the ongoing diffusion of some of the key themes and
concepts of the Prison Notebooks—above all, that of hegemony—
across almost all humanistic and social-scientific academic
disciplines, and a global prominence in all the major linguistic-
cultural zones of theoretical debate, is not the only reason that he
might be regarded as an unavoidable point of reference. Finally, it is
not only because Gramsci’s thought has constituted an important
reference for some of the most dynamic political movements and
formations of our time, from Venezuela to Bolivia, from Greece to
Spain, that he might be thought a fitting interlocutor for an attempt
to reflect on the theoretical and practical challenges that those
movements have posed.
The argument of this book is both more general and more
specific. In terms of the former, I wish to demonstrate that a reading
of some of the central themes associated with Gramsci’s thought and
the debates that have shaped its reception can provide us with
clarifying critical perspectives on these four central questions
regarding the distinctive goals, nature, method, and organizational
forms of emancipatory politics. There are immediate historical
reasons why a thinker such as Gramsci is particularly well placed to
help us to respond to questions of this nature. For whatever his
various afterlives and the truncated political, national, and
disciplinary receptions to which his writings have been subjected,
Gramsci was above all else a political practitioner and professional
revolutionary directly engaged in seeking answers to similar
questions in the movements of his own time. All of his writings both
before and after his imprisonment remained inextricably tied to this
context.
The extensive reflections on seemingly “other” forms of social life
that define the encyclopedic nature of the Prison Notebooks—
literature, culture, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and
folklore, among many others—were not subordinated to this primacy
of politics but enabled by it. As historical documents, the distinctive
answers that Gramsci provided to the questions posed by the world-
historical events in his own period undoubtedly continue to have a
cardinal importance in the record of revolutionary movements in the
twentieth century. It is only in this optic that any true measure can
be taken of the nature of Gramsci’s achievements in his own
historical context.
Yet in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci aimed to produce a political
theory that could not only explain the determining features of his
particular historical moment, one marked by the involution of a
revolutionary upsurge and the rise of extreme forms of fascist
reaction. He also sought to comprehend the deeper historical
processes that had produced and were condensed in that distinctive
moment. By so doing he formulated not a philosophia politica
perennis, at the heights of universalist abstraction, nor simply a
description of the conditions that obtained in Italy and Europe in the
interwar years, in a modestly nominalist fashion. Rather, he
produced what can be regarded—using his own terms—as a
“translatable” theory of the possibilities of emancipatory political
action in societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production
and structured as processes of subalternization.12
The translatability of the political theory of the Prison Notebooks
derives not from its presentation of an ensemble of generic
concepts, immediately good for all seasons. Their translation must
be actively attempted, based in the first instance on their potential
for meaningful reformulation in the vocabularies of the present. The
intensity of Gramsci’s immersion in the particular concrete conditions
of his own time enabled him to outline a singular critical perspective
on political modernity as processes of “subalternization” and their
contestation. Part of the reason that so many different political and
national conjunctures over the last 70 years have repeatedly thought
to find in Gramsci a “guide to action” may be because such
subalternization remains the “destiny” against which emancipatory
politics constitutively and necessarily struggles. One dimension of
this book will therefore explore the extent to which such a critical
perspective on subalternization drawn from Gramsci’s carceral
research might be translated once again today in order to clarify
some of the central debates of contemporary emancipatory politics.

The “Strategic Method” of Hegemony

The fundamental argument of this book, however, is that there is
also a more specific reason why Gramsci might be productively
translated in relation to the questions that have emerged within
contemporary movements. As Walter Benjamin argued,
translatability never simply inheres in an original text but is always a
relation that is produced in the work of translation itself, in its
distinctive combination of retrospection and projection.13 In this
sense, it is less a question of translating Gramsci into the present in
order to enlighten it than of being attentive to what might emerge
when Gramsci is translated by the present—that is, of how the
concerns of the present might illuminate previously obscured radical
potentials that were neglected by the now canonical interpretations
of his thought elaborated in previous political cultures.
This book therefore not only aims to propose a certain type of
“Gramscian” analysis of radical emancipatory politics today. Rather,
the central debates of our contemporary intersectional sociopolitical
movements also here provide an optic with which we can attempt to
read Gramsci in new ways. In their turn, these new readings are
then proposed as a potential basis for distinctive responses to the
four questions of an aitiology of contemporary emancipation. In this
perspective, much more important than any of Gramsci’s specific
concepts or analyses is thus the general approach with which he
confronted the challenges of his own time. It is this “strategic
method” that is here proposed as an example of an enabling way to
respond to the questions dominating our own conjuncture.
In a defeat much deeper than any our own times have known
(because the intensity of defeat is always measured in relation to the
frustration of a future that had been anticipated), Gramsci did not
passively suffer the terms in which his conjuncture posed its short-
sighted questions to him and to his contemporaries: to choose
between an adventurist impatience or the sobriety of an Olympian
distance, between the opportunism of too immediate tactics or the
compromises of disembodied long-term strategy. Whichever
alternative was accepted, the result was the same: to subordinate
emancipatory politics to the rhythms and priorities of the dominant
order and its theoretical comprehension rather than subjecting them
to a fundamental theoretical and practical critique.
Gramsci’s response was instead to beg those questions and to
refuse their false choices. Rather than being dominated by the
demands of his conjuncture, he actively confronted it with his own
set of interrogatives. These questions were articulated in a strategic
perspective, focused on the resolution of concrete organizational
challenges and grounded in an understanding of the self-
emancipation of the subaltern social classes as the project of
constructing the future out of the incoherence and contradictions of
the present. Each problem that Gramsci confronted was considered
in this open-ended futural perspective and not subordinated to the
periodizing and organizing imperatives of an existing order wedded
to the repetition of its own past.
The questions that the Prison Notebooks posed to their
conjuncture aimed to clarify the concrete possibilities for
emancipatory political action in the specific conditions of that
moment; but the strategic method by which they did so, in its
assumption and construction of the self-emancipation of the
subaltern social classes as the process of their “autonomization”
from the existing sociopolitical order, constitutes a methodological
discovery of a potentially more general validity. This strategic
method can be characterized as a categorical imperative continually
to “translate” the challenges of a given conjuncture into the terms of
the organizational forms and practices that represent their real
critique and resolution.
This categorical imperative was concretized in a distinctive,
strategically focused understanding of “hegemony” as a process of
“de-subalternization.” It is a perspective developed already in
Gramsci’s political activism prior to imprisonment and further
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating
the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may
be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a
copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or
damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph
1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner
of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must
return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity
that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may
demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the
problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur:
(a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b)
alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project
Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.
It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and
donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a
secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help,
see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can
be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the
widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and
keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in
locations where we have not received written confirmation of
compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of
compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no
prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in
such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of
other ways including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how
to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.